“A critic may even be specifically wrong yet theoretically right. Paul Elmer More, for instance, damns all modern literature with one irritated and uncomprehending gesture; he is academic and insensitive. The tragedy of it is, that most modern writers could learn a great deal from him if they did not find his irritation so irritating.”

When he wrote these lines, in 1930, Yvor Winters was a young instructor at Stanford University, and a poet well regarded in avant-garde circles; his first book of criticism was still seven years in the future. Yet in describing More, a sage of the neo-Humanist movement, Winters gave an oddly precise verdict on his own career as a critic of poetry. Of all the eminent poet-critics of his generation—John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur—none is more often “irritating,” “insensitive,” and “specifically wrong” than Winters. These qualities made him a fi ...

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